Tuesday, August 02, 2005

LaTeX woes

I'm no computer dummy. Maybe I know just enough to be dangerous. In either case, the online documentation for LaTex (and related editors, interfaces, etc.) is maddeningly obfuscatory.

Since I have realized that I will be teaching the intro stats course for our master's students indefinitely, I have become convinced that it would help both them and me if my notes were electronic and online. A very nice colleague at the Methods meeting convinced me that LaTex was the way to go in the long-term (and shared some useful .tex files), but in the short-term, it's very frustrating. I suspect that I only want to use about 10% (or less) of LaTeX's functionality.

4 Comments:

The trick to LaTeX is putting together templates that work for you and then reusing them. I have templates I've accreted for syllabi, papers (and other texty documents), PowerPoint-style slides, exams, and cover letters, and I just edit them as needed. (The second trick is to use some different fonts so your LaTeX documents don't look like everyone elses' LaTeX documents, reducing the "geek factor" significantly.)

But the initial hump is a bit of a pain. If you don't mind shelling out a few bucks, a book like A Guide to LaTeX can be very helpful.

Ah screw it. Spend a hundred bucks to get math type for Word (the enhanced equation editor). I haven't found much I can't do in Word that I can do in LaTex beyond formula etc. Some of the journals also prefer non-latex files for final editing (AJPS- I think). If you really need the approval of the methods crowd, save your time, and shell out the $800 for Scientific Word. Your time is worth more than $20 dollars an hour, and you will be spending more than 40 hours figuring everything out, debugging, and otherwise screwing around with LaTex capabilities.